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Monthly Archives: August 2015

The Continuing Meltdown of Washington Metro

By | | Transportation
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The day after a derailment shut down the downtown Washington portions of the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines, a power outage shut down portions of the Silver and Orange lines in Fairfax County, Virginia. Without offering any solutions (other than spend more money), the Washington Post has helpfully listed some of Metro’s biggest meltdowns of the past few years.

These are only the biggest ones the Post happens to remember. According to table 16 of the data tables in the National Transit Database, Metro suffered more than 1,200 “major mechanical failures” in 2013, which is 16 failures per million passenger-car miles. That’s nearly twice the rate of other heavy-rail lines in the country; Atlanta and Baltimore are worse, while New York City lines are much better (yet still have many problems and San Francisco’s BART is much better.

According to one insider, most of the failures are train breakdowns, power supply problems, and cracked rails. The breakdowns are mainly in the 1000 series cars that date back to the 1970s, the 4000 series cars from the 1990s, and the 5000 series cars from the early 2000s. The 5000 series is so bad that the agency would like to get an exemption from the Federal Transit Administration to scrap them before they reach their full, 25-year lifespans, but it has no cars to replace them with. Washington Metro has purchased 7000-series cars, but doesn’t expect to have them all in service before 2020. The power-supply problems include smoke from burning insulators and power failures such as the one in Fairfax County. Metro is spending less than a billion dollars a year on capital replacement, which is probably less than half as much as it needs to spend to put its system in a state of good repair. Continue reading →

The Millennial Dream

By | | Housing
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A new survey from Trulia confirms similar surveys in the past: Millennial housing preferences really aren’t much different from those of previous generations. Contrary to claims that most Millennials want to live in inner-city multifamily housing, nearly 90 percent of Millennials aspire to buy a single-family home. Moreover, the vast majority hoping to live in suburbs or small towns, while only 8 percent say they want to live in a central city.

The myth that Millennials want to live in cities is so pervasive that one news report claimed that the results of this survey contradict the “reality” that people are moving to the cities. In fact, as Wendell Cox has shown, central city population growth was slower in the 2000s than the 1990s, for both Millennials and the population in general. Meanwhile, suburbs and small towns continue to grow faster than center cities, even among 20-29 year olds.

While the populations of core neighborhoods in and near downtowns are growing when measured on a percentage basis, this is mainly because these populations were so low in the first place. The 1950s and 1960s saw most major cities evict residents from their downtowns as a part of the urban renewal process, which was the urban planning fad of that era. Now, the same urban renewal tools–tax-increment financing, eminent domain, and other gifts to developers–are used to bring people back to downtowns, which is today’s urban planning fad. While planners have proven that “if you subsidize it, they will come,” this isn’t evidence of a huge and permanent change in housing tastes.
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DC Metro Shut Down by Derailment

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Parts of the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines were shut down for eight-and-one-half hours after a train derailed before 6:00 in the morning at the Smithsonian stop near downtown Washington, DC. Although Metro hasn’t yet determined the cause of the derailment, it seems likely that the service interruption is due to poor maintenance, which has caused many other incidents. The accident also illustrates a fundamental problem with rail transit: when one train breaks down, an entire line–or, in this case, three lines–can be shut down.

Metro continued to run trains in the outer reaches of the system, but stations between Federal Center and McPherson Square–in other words, nearly all downtown stations on the Blue/Orange/Silver lines–were closed. The Red and Yellow/Green lines were unaffected, and Metro provided buses for passengers on the other lines needing to reach downtown.

By 2:30 pm, Metro had opened four of the six affected stations and ran trains on one track. Both tracks were in operation by midnight, and Metro hopes to have service completely restored this morning.

Hacking Self-Driven Cars

By | | Transportation
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Computer experts have figured out a way to hack a Jeep, allowing them to remotely control everything from music and windshield wipers to speed and brakes. This has led to a proposal for federal cyber-security legislation, while other people question what this means for self-driving cars.

The question of the cyber-security of automobiles is almost completely separate from self-driving cars. The self-driven cars developed by Google, Volkswagen, and other manufacturers rely on several kinds of sensors to direct their travel, including GPS, lasers, radar, infrared, and optical sensors. Of these, the only one that uses the radio spectrum is GPS, and since the cars use it only to determine a route, and not for minute-by-minute driving, I don’t think it could be vulnerable to a cyber attack.

Experts believe that hackers used Chrysler’s use of Sprint communications technologies in its cars aimed at providing auto buyers with an “in-vehicle communications system.” If so, then Sprint failed to build an adequate firewall between its communications and the car’s operating controls. Chrysler responded to the hack by recalling 1.4 million vehicles that have the Sprint system, presumably so it can somehow add such a firewall. According to Wired, the hackers that demonstrated the Sprint system’s vulnerability report that
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